Cova pricing in 2026: what Cova POS costs per month, and why the directories get the meter wrong

Neither, according to Cova. The published rate card meters workstations and states unlimited users and unlimited transactions on every tier. Boutique covers up to two workstations, Powerhouse up to four. Your bill is driven by how many points of sale you ring customers up on, not by how many people work for you and not directly by how many doors you have open.

This is the single most misreported fact about Cova, and the gap is enormous. ITQlick publishes Cova at $399 per user per month with tiers at $399, $999 and $2,999. Other roundups describe a per-user ladder starting at $149 for one user and reaching $1,299 at one hundred users. Take a real shop with ten staff logins across two registers. Under Cova's own published card that shop is on Boutique at $349 or $389 a month. Under a literal reading of the per-user figure it would be paying $3,990 a month. That is roughly a tenfold error sitting on a page that ranks well for people searching this exact question.

The practical consequence is that workstation metering rewards a very different shape of business than per-user metering does. A high-headcount, low-register operation, which describes most busy single storefronts running long hours with rotating budtenders, is cheap on this model and expensive on a per-seat one. A small-team shop that runs four or five registers for throughput is the opposite. Work out which one you are before you compare Cova against a per-user quote, because the winner flips depending on your staffing shape. We ran into the mirror image of this on Flowhub pricing, where the same $399 figure is published as per user by one directory and as a flat monthly by another, and nobody can resolve it because Flowhub publishes nothing.

On the published card the two tiers carry the same feature list. Both include built-in ecommerce, ID scanning, the mobile dashboard, analytics, automated compliance through state-approved integrations, kiosk, unlimited users and transactions, 99.99% uptime with offline mode, plug-and-play integrations at no extra fee, and support by email, phone and live chat. The stated differences are the workstation allowance, two versus four, and a dedicated account manager on Powerhouse.

That makes the choice between them mostly an arithmetic question about registers rather than a feature comparison, which is a refreshingly simple way to buy software. The place to be careful is the boundary. If you run two registers today and expect to add a third within the contract year, price Powerhouse now rather than discovering the step change later, and ask what happens mid-term if you exceed your workstation allowance.

The dedicated account manager is harder to value from outside and worth probing on reference calls. Ask two current Cova operators of roughly your size what their account manager actually does for them, how quickly support answers during business hours, and what happened the last time something broke on a Saturday afternoon. Support quality is the thing owners complain about most across every vendor in this category, and it is the thing a feature table never captures.

On published figures, Cova is the only one of the three you can answer this question about honestly, because it is the only one that publishes. Cova lists $349 to $599 a month by workstation. Dutchie is reported by third parties at roughly $499 to $1,000 a month per location for a full stack, with an ecommerce-only tier reported near $299 and setup around $349. Flowhub is most often reported at $399 to $499 a month, though the directories cannot agree whether that is per user or per account.

On those numbers Cova looks competitive to cheaper at the entry point, and the gap widens for a high-headcount shop because of the unlimited-users term. But the comparison is not clean and it would be dishonest to present it as one. Dutchie and Flowhub figures are estimates that neither vendor confirms, module inclusion differs across all three, and the payment processing arrangement can move the real total more than the subscription line does. A cheaper subscription with a worse processing rate is not cheaper.

Where Cova genuinely differentiates on the public record is reliability messaging. It markets 99.99% uptime and offline mode on every tier and has claimed eight years without a significant outage, which reads as a direct response to competitors that have had visible platform failures on high-volume days. Treat that as positioning rather than proof, and understand what offline mode does and does not cover before you weigh it, which our piece on dispensary POS offline mode sets out. If you are actively shopping alternatives, our Dutchie alternatives comparison puts Cova, Blaze, Meadow, Flowhub and Jane side by side on more than price.